Relaxing 101

I just woke up from a heck of a nap; it was very satisfying. I've gotten really good at taking naps since my daughter came around. It used to be impossible for me to take a nap for whatever reason, but now, if I have the time, I'm out like a light. Today has been a pretty lazy day overall. I got up around 8 and my fiancé had already gotten the little girl started on breakfast, so I didn't have to worry about that. Although it's a little overcast today and it isn't the warmest day, I really wanted to get over to the pool with the little girl. Still, it's about 80 degrees, so it's not like it's cold or anything. When we went to the pool yesterday around 10, there was practically no one there, so I figured it was a good time to go. When we first got there today, we were the only ones there, and by the time we left, only 2 other people had shown up. She doesn't seem to have a lot of patience for the pool, though; after about 20 minutes, she was done. I would have liked to stay a bit longer, but she wanted to get out, and I'm not going to win that argument. So, we packed back up and headed home. Since we moved to this complex almost 4 years ago, we've only gone to the pool a handful of times. I would like to change that this summer, so I'm hoping to get into a groove of going whenever we can. It's nice and relaxing for me.

Since the pandemic hit back in March, we haven't gone out to eat or ordered in a single time. I think the last time I had food from a restaurant was the first week I worked at my new job, so like March 13th. I was digging the idea of being able to eat wherever I wanted to for lunch, so I hit up some places around where I worked, but that was it. I think that first week, we may have gone to Texas Roadhouse for dinner, and I felt foolish going out to eat with what was already looming with the pandemic. Since then, we've limited our trips to the grocery store and made all of our meals at home. Our tastebuds have been craving some of those familiar food groups for quite some time, and it was only a matter of time before we broke down. Things like pizza, or a steak, or thai food: I missed them so much. I've been seeing all these commercials for contactless delivery for all the popular pizza chains, so I justified it in my mind, and went big. This afternoon, we ordered 4 pizzas from Dominos. This is enough pizza to last us a couple days, and I nearly ate a whole pizza for lunch. Honestly, it wasn't even that great, but it satisfied the urges I've been having.

Last night and into today, I've been hard at work on the microservices course by Stephen Grider. I noticed a question in the Q&A section of the course: "Is the course done yet?" I thought it was, but apparently not. I hadn't refreshed my page for a week or so, so I did. All of a sudden, the course is now 54 hours instead of 45. It's hard to say, but I think I still have about 20 to 25 hours left. I'm definitely past the halfway point, but still have a ways to go. It looks like the material he added is pretty interesting, stuff like CI/CD, which is pretty important in the world of Docker and Kubernetes. We built out a couple of the microservices on the backend yesterday using a method I had only come across in name before: TDD, or test-driven development. In this method, you write tests before you write the code. You expect the tests to fail at first, then write the code to get them to pass. We wrote tests for different routes for the tickets section of the backend, where someone can add or update a ticket. The tests consisted of things like, if the user isn't authenticated, they can't create a ticket. Or, if the ticket wasn't created by the user, they can't update it. This is a really interesting way to write code; you basically cover all edge cases, as long as you think of them, from the get-go. After that, we moved on to NATS, which is a way of handling events in an event bus. Events are passed to NATS and moved to the appropriate microservice. In the last project, we created our own event bus from scratch. It was cumbersome and wasn't all encompassing. This seems like a great way to handle events.

Until tomorrow!